The kind of photography I do begins as a moment of theft. Finding the scene, finding your angle, and stealing the moment for yourself. Some photographers are creators. They build a scene, a still life, or arrange their models and angle their lights and create an image from nothing. I’m not one of those photographers. I’m a thief.
"Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized by what it is." Those words, written by art critic John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing, annotate one part of his understanding of the history of oil paintings: it’s obsessive tendencies toward showmanship of what one has, and the relationship between property and art.
Since elementary school, I've been told that things had to match. If I wore Sean John pants, then I had to wear a Sean John shirt. If I wore anything Nike, then I had to have the matching shoes to correspond. This was a mindset that I held throughout most of my life.
After our first visit to Yosemite National Park, my girlfriend and I have made it our goal to try to visit as many National Parks as possible. It's partly because of how beautiful and varied the parks are from one another, and partly because of the escape from the everyday noises that we find while out there.
I feel that there's a word missing from our vocabulary, and this essay is the culmination of an effort to find such a word, to define it usefully, and to work through some of what it might mean.
A week and a bit ago I was in Falmouth, on stage, in front of maybe a bit less than 100 or so students. It was Tuesday, around 2pm. I felt oddly calm and eager. They looked expectedly unenthusiastic.
A dark reality exists within photography that few photographers are willing to discuss and many refuse to even recognize. In the name of purity, we tend to see photography as a medium that couldn’t -- shouldn’t be able to -- do harm.
Here's an inspiring video in which renowned adventure photographer Cory Richards discusses why he believes vulnerability is the key to making great art.
Something is off in our modern photographic culture. We’ve lost something. Something… big.
I remember the first time I picked up a digital camera. It was 2003 and I got this little Canon G5, a good point-and-shoot, and it was 5 megapixels.
With Photokina coming up later this month, we’ll soon have a good chance to see whether Nikon is playing to their competencies or incompetencies with their next round of announcements. Every company has some core competencies that can’t be denied. What are Nikon’s?
I've been a street photographer for a while now, and I would like to share what I believe are 3 popular misconceptions about street photography -- things I've seen pop up over and over.
"That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms
Street photography ethics are a touchy subject and I am not talking of street photography rules but rather more how photographers choose to behave. When shooting (candid) street photography in London or anywhere else, many street photographers seem to leave their values at home as soon as they head out to photograph strangers.
I’ve avoided writing about Pokémon GO for a whole four days, trying my best to keep from inundating the Internet with yet another think-piece. However, something interesting has happened the last two times I have played the game with friends: I have taken some exceptional photos.
"We love your style! So we're going to hire you to do something completely different!" If that sentence makes you laugh, then the 30 statements in this post are going to hit home.
Should you ever give a client photos in exchange for "exposure"? That's the question discussed in this 6-minute video by NYC-based portrait and fashion photographer Jeff Rojas. He shares 3 things you can turn exposure into money.
Amidst a barrage of violent imagery in the past week graphically illustrating the deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and five Dallas police officers, Jonathan Bachman’s image of a protest in Baton Rouge has emerged as iconic.
Here are random observations from my time as staff photographer for Dean for America. I wrote this some time ago as advice for somebody who was going to be a campaign photographer.
In this article, I'll discuss seven reasons why I'm still a Nikon DSLR user... plus three reasons why I could be convinced to move on.
I kept this post as a draft for months, unsure if I should publish it since it discusses things and events that aren't very easy to share. I hope it can inspire and help at least one person from my personal life experience.
Ted Forbes of The Art of Photography made this 7.5-minute video in which he talks about a brutal truth of photography: the fact that "nobody is interested in seeing your photographs. Nobody cares about the work that you're doing as a photographer."
Fisheye lenses are often considered a ‘no-no’ among professional landscape and cityscape photographers. People see them as not much more than a gimmick. I often hear complaints about fisheye lenses because of ‘that ugly distortion’.
The great American photographer Walker Evans is best known for his stark photos that document the years of the Great Depression in the US. In the 4.5-minute video above, produced many years afterwards, Evans looks back on his photography and offers a glimpse into his mindset at the time he shot it.
Pretty much any photographer will be familiar with GAS: gear acquisition syndrome. As much as I hate to admit it, when I’m holding a new lens or camera body I can’t help but feel an exciting feeling.
Remember your first time taking photographs? I'm talking about before you joined Reddit or a camera forum, before you started posting pictures to Instagram or sharing them with your friends. The time when you considered yourself a hobbyist. The time when you were considered a tourist in your own neighborhood.
Here's a video from 2011 in which respected Los Angeles-based social documentary photographer John Free vents about his personal frustration with photographic education.
I shoot with a Sony a6000, a Sigma 19mm f/2.8, and a vintage Helios 44-6. My entire kit cost me less than $500 (second hand) and technically, it sucks.
In an April 2016 interview, Mark Zuckerberg told Buzzfeed News, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”
We tend to see photos in isolation. By that I don’t mean we only see one photo at a time -- between Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram, we’ve become comfortable consuming many photos at once -- but that we see only one photo from a scene.
“Fauxtographer” (according to Urban Dictionary): A person that claims to be a good photographer when in reality they just set their camera to automatic mode a start shooting. This person also happens to fumble over photographic terms or has no knowledge of the terms or switches the color mode to monochrome and calls it artistic no matter what the hell is in frame.
Recently one of my cousins messaged me asking for some camera advice. He was looking for help choosing a new camera and wondered if I had any suggestions. Without wasting any time I started writing back a sort of stream of consciousness response.
I'm a photographer who is in no way wedded to any particular aspect ratio. I will trim my images to whatever I consider suits them best, whether or not they fall to one of the recognized ratios or some non-integer ratio.
I have these utopic dreams of a “perfect” camera. I want a camera that makes photos that are ultra-sharp, yet soft, affordable, yet fits in my front pocket, yet has tons of megapixels, yet can zoom to see anything but wide enough to shoot interiors.
One interesting distinction I find in speaking “American English” and with “European English” is how we differentiate between “taking” and “making” photos.
There is a big craze for Sony full frame (FF) mirrorless cameras at the moment, and seeing people rush onto that bandwagon is like watching lemmings following each other over the cliff.
I see this sight with increasing frequency: people holding up their phone in front of their face, recording a cool event or situation, like a concert or speech, watching the three-dimensional live event through a tiny screen.
Recently, a friend told me of a photographer for whom he wanted to work. The seasoned fine art photographer, in his 50s, took a look at my friend’s 5x7 prints, taken on an assortment of digital and analog cameras, and said "These are not photos. Wait here."
All the numbers have been pointing upwards for Instagram. In fact, a recent analysis shows that Instagram will be used by 1 in 3 person, in the US, by 2020. With 400 million active users today, it is the only platform where people exclusively take and share visual content and nothing else.
This week, Flickr announced that they are taking away one of the key “free” functions: the ability to auto upload photos from your computer directly to Flickr. Now you need to sign up for a “pro” account for access to the same function.